Stories

Fundry.com is a new crowdfunding platform from the makers of bugmenot, retailmenot, cushycms and trendsmap, that helps developers get paid for developing new features, and enables a community of funders to contribute to get the features they want. Win win. Find out more at fundry.com.

Many, if not all, of the RubyConf 2010 videos are now available on the Confreaks website. Several are quite good, but Aaron Patterson's ZOMG WHY IS THIS CODE SO SLOW? is definitely worth a look if you're short on time.

Jimmy Cuadra has released a Ruby library which works with the Google Translate API, called to_lang. It extends String to provide several convenience methods for translating strings on the fly. You're only required to have your own API key, and other than that, "Nos encanta".to_english.

Ben Hughes wrote an article this week to remind everyone why they should always validate maximum lengths in their Rails models. He's also put together a gem, called validates_lengths_from_database which will make building those validations much easier.

Drew Neil from vimcasts.org dropped us a line before the new year to let us know about a plugin for VIM which makes it really easy to select and navigate blocks of ruby code. If you're a Vim fanatic, and well, obviously you use Ruby, then it's at least worth a good, long look.

Justin Ramel recently wrote up some posts showing how to use the vim-ruby-refactoring plugin. With it, you can extract a variable to a constant, extract some code into the method, rename local or instance variables, add parameters, and more.

Allen Wei wrote up a nice post showing how easy it is to write command-line tools in Ruby. He starts with a basic, Ruby-only implementation, then demonstrates OptionParser, and finally graduates to Thor.

We (Envy Labs) released a set of six Rails 3 cheat sheets, last week. They cover the majority of the new external, aka application developer, APIs in Rails 3. They cover Routing, Bundler, ActiveRelation, UJS, and more.

Just before the end of the year, the RubyGems team bestowed version 1.4.0 and 1.4.1 upon us. With it, though, came a very ominous, "DO NOT UPGRADE IN RUBY 1.9," message. So, please heed their advice. Upgrade in Ruby 1.8, if you like, but unless you detest kittens, do not upgrade in Ruby 1.9.

Alex, on the Optimis Dev blog, wrote an article to remind developers not to ever run bundle update. At least ,not most of the time. Bundle update is used only when updating an already-existing dependency with your Gemfile. More often useful is just the plain-old bundle install for adding a new dependency. Know your tools, people, or you could put an eye out.